‘We had to take full ownership of data’: Why Denmark’s biggest news site cut reliance on Google’s tech

Publishers love to disagree, but almost all of them will say they have an uneasy relationship with Google.

They can’t fully trust a business that they say isn’t completely upfront about how it makes money from their audiences. But few publishers are brave enough to act on those concerns, not when they’re so dependent on Google for ad revenue. Every so often, though, a publisher will feel they have no choice but to make a move.

Ekstra Bladet, Denmark’s biggest news site with 500 million page views per month, reached this pinch point three weeks ago. The publisher said goodbye to Google Analytics in favor of a homegrown alternative called Longboat and hasn’t looked back. And while it’s too early to call the switch an outright success, there’s always an upside to having more influence over data, especially for publishers.

No Google Analytics means no middleman between Ekstra Bladet and data from its site, whether its views or subscription conversions. The two-sentence summary of this dynamic’s net effect is this: Ekstra Bladet is now in full control of the entire data flow around its site, meaning execs can wrangle it all much easier. The days of struggling to get Google Analytics to play nice with its own proprietary tools should be long gone — in theory at least. Google did not respond to a request for comment by deadline.

Not only can the publisher get this data faster from its own platform, but it can also access more of it. It took minutes to get the 30 million or so data points Google Analytics tracked daily, whereas now it takes seconds to get up to 137 million data points, said Thomas Lue Lytzen, head of product development and insights for ad sales and tech at Ekstra Bladet’s owner JP/Politikens.

“We need near real-time data to support not only our commercial team’s plan for better targeting on the site, but also the editorial team’s efforts to react to trending news faster,” said Lue Lytzen. “But we had to take ownership of the data collection ourselves to get to this point.”

Advertisers are taking notice, and comfort in, how much control Ekstra Bladet now has over its data at a time when data provenance is table stakes for many businesses. In other words, Ekstra Bladet execs can vouch for how all its audiences and contextual segments are being built.

This is hard to do with full confidence when that data comes from a middleman like Google. Consider it a sort of liability comfort blanket for the General Data Protection Regulation age: reassurance that whatever happens to the data, it is on the publisher’s watch.

“Having full ownership over our data is giving us leverage with major advertisers who like the fact that we’re not reliant on another vendor when it comes to our web analytics and can offer complete transparency,” said Lue Lytzen.

Plans are already underway to make this data more accessible, especially to ad tech vendors. Moving forward, audience …read more

Source:: Digiday